


Material Witness—Every Day I Write the Book (2 x 14, 5 x 22)

by Polly_Lynn



Series: Material Witness [18]
Category: Castle
Genre: Angst, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Male-Female Friendship, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-24
Updated: 2016-05-24
Packaged: 2018-06-10 11:51:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6955354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"But the year is better than three weeks old. Resolutions have long fallen by the wayside, and here it is, tumbled in with all those good intentions. A twelve-month pony-a-day calendar. He snatches it up right away, like someone else might want the dented box. Like the cover with the chubby little chestnut with flowers woven into the dark cascade of her mane is a draw for anyone who hadn't just stayed up late with Kate Beckett."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Material Witness—Every Day I Write the Book (2 x 14, 5 x 22)

**Author's Note:**

> A last chapter.

 

* * *

_Chapter one we didn't really get along_

_Chapter two I think I fell in love with you_

"Every Day I Write The Book" — Elvis Costello

* * *

_2010_

He finds it in the remainder bin. Eighty percent off or something, and it's tumbled in with oversized pastel paperclips and long, lined notepads on a cardboard back with a magnet at the top. It's tumbled in with all the things people squinting through their New Year's hangovers were sure they'd use faithfully. Color-coded clips and to-do list paper for the fridge.

But the year is better than three weeks old. Resolutions have long fallen by the wayside, and here it is, tumbled in with all those good intentions. A twelve-month pony-a-day calendar. He snatches it up right away, like someone else might want the dented box. Like the cover with the chubby little chestnut with flowers woven into the dark cascade of her mane is a draw for anyone who hadn't just stayed up late with Kate Beckett.

He snatches it up and steps into the winding cattle call of a line. He scowls at the dragging pace of it. Wonders grumpily if his fellow New Yorkers haven't gotten the memo that the brick-and-mortar bookstore is a dead institution.

He scowls, but it's an impermanent thing. It gives way to an incongruous smile. He's tired. More gritty behind the eyes even than usual. He stays up late with her a lot, but this time there were milkshakes, and that more than calls for a smile. This time he carried her garment bag and held the door for her. He paid the bill when she wasn't looking.

This time it was a _date,_ and he's nothing if not a gentlemen. Nothing if not schooled in the art of wooing, and a first date calls for a gift. A memento that will make her laugh and roll her eyes. A memento he thinks she might just hold on to, because she likes him a little more than she'd like to. A lot more than she'd like him to know, and he thinks she'll hold on to it.

She won't keep it at her desk. Not a chance in hell of that, and it might really be part of the draw. The fact that she'll have to take it somewhere that's _not_ her desk. Not the precinct at all, and it's a little piece of him that'll travel with her to wherever it is.

"Sir." The terse voice doesn't seem to appreciate any of the possibilities or the incongruous smile that comes with them. None of the terse voices, ahead and behind, seems to appreciate the fact that he stayed up late with Kate Beckett, and it was a date. "I can take the next person."

"Me. I'm next." He answers eagerly. He clutches the box tight and has the merest flutter of a second thought, but the chubby little chestnut smiles up at him, and it's done. "This." He sets the box on the counter. "Just this."

A memento, because it was a date. And a pony-a-day calendar it is.

* * *

_First date_

It's what he means to write. What he has every intention of writing with as much flourish as he can cram into nine letters, but his pen hovers, uncertain. The twenty-fifth. That's where he'd meant to make his mark, because that's where the bare skin of her shoulder and the unexpectedly playful spray of curls live in memory. That's where her date with Brad begins and ends. His date with Amanda.

 _And Amanda's with Brad,_ he thinks, feeling a little nasty about it. Feeling more than a little ashamed at how badly he'd behaved. How little he cares, given the way one day bled into another.

His finger slips under the corner of the cheap, furry page. He sneaks a peek at the twenty-sixth with its shy, dappled pony peeking from behind a broad trunk with low, sweeping boughs. He supposes that's really where any inscription ought to live. Nine letters and every flourish, because the clock had long since ticked over before they made it to Remy's.

He wants to cheat, though. He likes the bold, dark pony trotting right up to the camera and staring right into the lens. He wants the red dress for himself. He wants the bare shoulder and the slithering, tinkling stack of bangles at her wrist to belong to him. He wants it to be their one-day anniversary already, and suddenly it's all a little heavier than he meant it to be. The calendar and the ponies, even at eighty percent off.

He's greedy about her, lately. Greedy _for_ her and that's . . . a problem. It will be if he lets it. She doesn't like him _that_ much more than she wants him to know, whatever he'd like to think in the wee hours when he's staying up late with her _._

He flips back and forth. The twenty-fifty, the twenty-sixth. Yesterday. Today. Yesterday.

_Today_

He grits his teeth and says the word out loud. Honesty wins out over sentiment. He sets pen to paper, but it doesn't go as planned.

 _Remy's,_ he writes. A tight, tentative little grouping of letters. No flourish at all.

He stays up late with her that night, too. The night after. Not _with her_ with her, but still. He stays up late with the pony calendar.

He's got just three weeks to play with. A little more than that, and he tells himself it'll be funny if he flips back. If he fills in days here and there with their goings on. He flips back two weeks. To Kyra's wedding day and that's just the thing. Two ponies dancing around one another in wide circles on a misty field of green. It's exactly the thing.

_Plus One_

He writes it dead center, just above the bottom of the tear-off page. He gives it curlicues and flourishes aplenty, like an engraved invitation, but it's not enough. He traces in a pair of wedding bells on either side, and still it's not enough of the story.

_(You weren't invited.)_

He scrawls that beneath the flourishes in hasty block caps, then wonders about it.

_(Maybe I wasn't.)_

That satisfies him. It captures the entropy of the whole thing. It takes him back to the moment and makes him chuckle when he thinks of the look of horror on her face when she caught the bouquet.

He riffles forward and lands on the in-between. The halfway point between then and now.

 _A_ _week._

It's hardly been a week, and he almost can't believe that it hasn't been longer. That it hasn't been an eternity since Dick Coonan died.

He covers the square page with his palm. He blots out the pony with its head lifted toward sunlight and a crumbling stone fence, because there's nothing funny about that day. Nothing funny about her gunning down her mother's murderer and finding no measure of peace in it.

There's nothing funny, but he peels his hand away, and the white space to the left of the number—to the left of the day of the week—is appalling. Because they ate together at her desk and he finds himself scrawling in a tiny Chinese take-out container. He pictures the comfortable hunch of her shoulders as she dips her head and tries not to make a mess of her spicy tuna roll. He sketches in cannoli and a milkshake and a hot dog loaded with toppings. And in the only white space left—a rectangle not quite dead center—he writes his own name. A legend underneath like a business card.

_Richard Castle_

_Pigtails Pulled_

* * *

He forgets it the next morning. He lets himself forget the dented little box, and it's not quite accidental. He tells himself it needs wrapping and there isn't time. There's a body. There's always a body, though, and he knows well enough this is something else. It's become something else so quickly. It's the way things are with her. With them, and all it takes are a few strokes of the pen that are and aren't what he meant them to be. It's not the joke-not-a-joke he meant it to be, and he's the one to hold on to it.

He's the one to flip back almost to the beginning of the year. To a week in—hardly more—and scratch two hesitant _ones_ to mark the grim anniversary on the ninth. Two hesitant words, then three more.

_So sorry_

_So sorry, Kate_

He's the one to lift a month's worth of pages in search of joy. To flip forward a little more to find the right date in early February. To find a sharpie for that and use the whole page, pony and all, for three emphatic words: JOE. FREAKIN'. TORRE.

He's the one to set the story down, and probably it was always going to be that way. Probably, it was meant to be him, skipping ahead to circle his own birthday and jot down a wish list. To add to it when they visit Lady Irena's House of Pain and she knows just a little too much for him not to want to know a _lot_ more.

He's the one to skip ahead to November. To her birthday in the middle of another night. He's the one to write question marks all across the page when he realizes he has no idea what she'd want. However many things he has tucked away in a high-up closet, he has no idea at all. But he has a pony-a-day to figure it out.

* * *

 

It's hard to resent the ponies. It's hard to put them away, but he does it. Emphatically and without comment, he forces the cube back into the dented box, and it's not easy, given how broad and flared it is with handling. Given how often he's pored over almost every single day and found something to commemorate, whether he sets pen to furry paper or not.

But he puts it away when it comes down to Demming and a lie. When it comes down to Gina and what makes sense for both of them. For all of them in this sensible/non-sensical quadrilateral.

He puts it away, but not for good.

It spends the summer high up in the closet with more things than he cares to think about, every one bought with her in mind. Every one tucked away without the least idea what she really wants.

It comes right back down when it's autumn and she's taken him back. He counts all the days spent without her and wonders where Demming should go. Not the beginning of Demming. He knows that too well.

_No flag on the play_

He almost writes that back in April. Almost tears the fucking page out, but he drags his thumb all along the edge of June instead. All along the edge of July, August, most of September. He teases the skin raw and wonders when the end came. _How_ it came.

He wonders and writes nothing. It sits on the edge of the desk then. A read-only medium for months. A pony-a-day calendar at rest until it's nearly outlived its usefulness. It sits there all the while, and that's . . . telling.

He's angry with Gina by year's end. She's angry with him, and it's all depressingly predictable. She's tired of him compartmentalizing. He's furious with her flipping through his life like a card catalog when she doesn't care, really. When knowing is a means to an end. A way to manage every inch of life she can.

They don't spend New Year's together. He and Gina.

They do spend New Year's together. He and Beckett.

They share a private, too-early toast in his office at The Old Haunt. Perfectly innocent and entirely damning.

She slips away before the ball drops. He tucks her into a cab along with his heart and the last of the illusions he's carried for months. He wants to be on his way, then and there, but he's the host, and it's far longer after midnight than he'd like when he's moving swiftly through the dark of the loft.

He takes the calendar up solemnly in the eerie in-between time. He takes it up reverently, with two hands and a good pen nearby.

He flips back almost to the beginning. To the frigid night when he'd thought he'd lost her to fire and smoke and his own creation. To the too-brief stretch of nights and days she'd spent, utterly at home in his loft. Utterly at home with his mother and his daughter and him.

He tells their stories in pictures. In snatches of conversation and out-of-context quotes. In thought bubbles that rise up over ponies' heads. He skips back and forth. Spring to fall and back again. Then to now.

The blank space of the summer looms larger and larger as he goes along. He hates not knowing how she passed the time. If she was happy. If she was angry. If she missed him.

_If . . ._

He wants to know, but more than that, he wants to fill the empty space. He wants an unbroken expanse from then to now. From him to her, and all he can do is write what he knows.

He skips ahead to early July. To the long weekend of the fourth made longer by quality time spent in the Hamptons lock-up after he'd keyed Gina's car. After they'd fought so epically about him putting the damned book to bed at last.

He flips back to the day he started dedication. The hardest part of writing the stupid fucking book, and he stretches it out across the days.

_To_

_The_ _Real Nikki Heat_

_With . . ._

His pen scatters ellipses across one page and the next and the next and the next. It measures the anguish in real time.

 _Gratitude,_ he writes on the page five days out.

It's what he'd settled on. After Gina and lock up and half a summer gone. It's what he'd settled on in sorrow and still-bitter anger. But with the sun rising on a new year, it's not enough. It's not honest or right or anything he wants to carry with him. The sky lightens and the task seems urgent. His pen moves quickly. Expansively as the words he should've said come to him at last.

_With all I'm good for . . ._

_With more of my heart than I knew there was to give . . ._

_With_ _love . . ._

The sun rises on a new year. He puts it away for good.

* * *

_2014_

"I want breakfast." Her voice is too loud in his ear. Too loud mashed against his shoulder, because she can't seem to let go of him, and he doesn't seem to mind.

"Ok," he says, more quietly, and she thinks at first it's just the volume teeter-totter they're on, but it's more than that. More than she can process with this loud, jangling constantly-in-motion world where her life isn't over.

"I want an omelette." She tips her chin up and opens her mouth against his skin. She tastes the salt of sweat. Of tears he kept hidden till she'd made him leave. Till what she'd thought was the end, and she barrels right past that. Has to. For now, she has to. "I want a latte as big as my head and all the food that diner has."

" _All_ of it." He draws back. He looks her up and down. "Those are your skinniest skinny jeans, Beckett."

He swings her out to arm's length as he says it. Falls in step with her, barreling right through to something lighter. But it's enough of a struggle to show, and she wants to kiss him again. She _does_ kiss him.

"All of it." She tugs at him. Enlists him in the urgent mission to _move_. To press her weak knees and quivering everything into service. "I want to keep ordering until the table creaks."

"Until it collapses," he agrees with a solemn nod.

He tugs her back the other way. In the actual direction of the diner, apparently. They fall, laughing, into a booth. They order everything, just about, and she can't stop laughing. At him and the foam that clings to the tips of his hair when she catches him at just the right moment and he guffaws into his latte. At the dishes that keep coming.

"Amazing," she mutters around a bite of bacon. Around a perfectly crusty corner of sourdough that's drenched with butter. "Castle, it's all . . ."

She breaks off, chastened by nothing he's done or said or indicated. By a sudden feeling of greed that comes entirely from within. Entirely from a long-standing, truncated sense of what she can have. What's possible in her life.

"Do you . . . .?" She sets down her fork, carefully. "You must want . . ."

She looks out the window. Looks away, but he sweeps both her hands from the table. He holds them fast and kisses her fingertips. Delicate, reverent brushes of lips on skin.

"There's nothing," he says, spilling the words down the backs of her hands. "There's nothing I want that isn't right here."

* * *

They roll out of the diner leaning on one another. Joined at the hip, and it's novelty and luxury and necessity all at once.

"Where to?" He murmurs against her cheek as they come to no corner in particular.

"My place," she says quickly. "Can we. . .?" she adds, just as quickly, because she doesn't want him to misunderstand. "Do you mind if we . . .?" She doesn't want to take it for granted, either. She's weary with the up and down of what she wants and doesn't want.

"We can." He quiets her with lips on her forehead. On each cheek. "I don't mind." He holds her by the shoulders. Holds her out at arm's length, contemplating something. Plotting. "A stop, though," he says. "A detour to the loft. Do _you_ mind?"

She's about to say she doesn't. Of course she doesn't, but her phone buzzes. It's a nothing text from the precinct, but the weight of the phone in her hand triggers memory.

"'My dad," she chokes. "Castle, I called . . ."

"Go." He's kissing her urgently. Tumbling her into the back of a cab that's materialized at a gesture of his. "I'll meet you. I'll be there before you know it. Go call him right back."

"Meet me," she says, but the door is already closing. The cab is already pulling away. "Meet me."

* * *

He's as good as his word. He's there before she knows it. There before she's anything like recovered from the conversation with her dad.

He's there before she can make a sound when he calls out from the foyer. From the kitchen and the hallway. He's there kicking off his shoes and shedding his clothes. Reverently lifting this part of her body, then that part from the bed until they're skin to skin in the dark of her bedroom.

He's there, silent and enveloping as sobs rack her body. Eager as she falls on him with violent, sorrowful desire. He's there as she falls into deep, immediate sleep with sweat and tears still cooling on her skin.

He's there when she starts awake, shouting and afraid. It's who knows how many hours later, but he's there, ready with reassurances in her ear.

"It's ok. Your place, Kate. We're at your place." He curls her fingers around the long edge of the duvet. Tips her chin toward the gauzy light though the shaded bedside lamp he must have turned on. He guides her to landmarks. Touchstones. "Your place. It's ok."

"Tired," she croaks. "How are you not tired?" She drapes on hand over her eyes, dizzy with even that much effort.

"I am," he says and sounds it. "Tired." He sinks into the mattress. Into her body. "Your dad?" He holds her fingers tight right under his chin. Right against his heart. He spills the question down the backs of her hands. "It's ok?"

"No." She's realizing it. Realizing something fundamental about her job. Not just about herself, though that's problematic enough. _She's_ problematic enough, and their relationship is, given everything. "I can't make it ok for him, but we are . . . My dad and me . . . we're as ok as we can be."

"Good."

It's a little absent sounding. A little rueful, but no less sincere for it. She wonders, though. With the conversation behind her and the howling edge of fear and relief and anger blunted a little by their two bodies here and now, she wonders. She realizes.

"Martha," she says. "Alexis." The name scours her insides. "You called them when you left. You weren't supposed to come back, Castle . . ." She tugs her hands from his. She's ashamed. Horrified.

"I was always coming back." He gives chase. Doesn't bother with her hands this time. He winds his arms around her and buries his face against her neck. "I was never not coming back." A shudder runs through his body, though. "So I called."

"They're ok?" She struggles to turn in his arms. To face him, even though she's ashamed. "Castle, you're ok?"

"No," he says, but there's a weak smile alongside the word. "My mother . . . we're ok. Alexis. We will be."

She's not sure. She thinks back to the bank. The raw, shaking fury in the girl's voice and the force of her own belated realizations about Montgomery's funeral. She was there. His daughter. His mother. Her father. They were all there, and her piecemeal memories are unbearable. She's not sure they'll ever be ok, but he whispers it again, and she has to believe it along with him.

"You should be with them . . ."

"I'm not going." He rolls right over her words. He kisses her and there's a smile in it that's only a little forced. There's a crackle of energy skipping over his skin. "I'm not."

"No?" She smiles, too. Only a little forced, because she'd doesn't want him to go. She doesn't want to do without him right now, whether she should or not. "What _are_ you going to do?"

She snakes one foot around his calf. She winds herself closer around him, but the sudden roar of her stomach undoes all of it. The sinuous movement of her body and the sultry way her voice drops low.

"Feed you, I guess." He laughs as he presses a palm to her middle. "Again."

He's out of the bed before she can protest. He's shrugging on a t-shirt and comfortable drawstring pants before she can really give chase. She flops on to her stomach with her fingers brushing the floor. Brushing the sloppy pile of clothes he'd shed in his rush to come to her.

Her knuckles knock against something heavy. A sturdy, perfect square. She casts aside his shirt, and the low light glances off the silvery paper. Off the curl of ribbon.

There's a card with this one. There isn't always. Isn't usually, and her curiosity gets the better of her.

_I lied_

There's just the two words and the date. Today's date, and that's strange enough, because the present is older. It has history, and she doesn't have to open it to know that.

He gives her things, big and small and romantic and ridiculous. He gives her things all the time, but she knows this silvery little square has history and she's too curious about the card to wait. Too eager to know what it means to call out or carry it into the kitchen.

Her nails scrabble at the paper. She laughs out loud at the cover of the box. The idyllic scene and the soft light filtering through the the mane of the cheerful, chubby pony. The year makes her catch her breath.

_2010_

She's flooded with memory. Good and bad, awful and wonderful. _Hard,_ she thinks. All of it harder than it should have been. She works at the cardboard flap with shaking fingers. She flips without thinking to the January ninth and sees the sorrow written between the lines. She riffles her thumb along the pages and lets them stop where they will.

The tears spill down her cheeks and she laughs out loud again and again at the ridiculous ponies. At the ridiculous things he's said. Lies and truths and revelations. Things she's always known and things she wishes she'd realized so much sooner.

"Beckett?"

His shadow falls across the page. He's in the doorway, his broad shoulders blocking out the light from the hall, but she doesn't look up.

"You started without me," he says. He's trying to keep it light, but his steps are hesitant across the room.

On instinct she flips to the end of May. Memorial Day weekend and the pain is sharp. She wants a pen, though it's not the time. Not right now. She makes her way through June where the entries are sparse and terse and angry

He sinks to the bed. Sinks against her and makes their hands work together. He guides their hands just past the exact middle of the year and draws a finger under his own writing. Emphasis and forward motion.

_To_

_The_ _Real Nikki Heat_

_With_

_Gratitude_

He stops there. He drags a nail across the word hard enough to score the paper and she _really_ wants a pen, but he moves on quickly.

_With all I'm good for . . ._

_With more of my heart than I knew there was to give . . ._

_Quickly_. He flies past those and holds the pages back with a palm he can't seem to make heavy enough.

 _With_ _love . . ._

"I love you." He turns his lips against her skin, murmuring endlessly. "I lied today. I've loved you for so long, Kate. So long."

She wants to tell him. To confess her own lie, but she doesn't know even now when that begins and ends, she doesn't know even now when she stopped lying to herself and she's weak with gratitude that she has time to wonder. Time to catch up and make amends, and she makes a start on it. She turns to him and makes a start.

"I love you." She holds tight to the calendar. Holds tight to him. "I love you, Castle."

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> No excuse for this. I'll take this story down last.


End file.
